People of MPI

MPI Executive Committee

Tarja Cronberg

MPI Chair

Dr. Cronberg has held numerous senior positions in the Finnish government and the European Parliament, where she chaired the delegation for relations with Iran. Dr. Cronberg has also served as Finland’s Minister of Labor and as Special Advisor on Nuclear Disarmament for the Finnish Institute for International Affairs.

In the European Parliament, Dr. Cronberg was a member of the Committees for Foreign Affairs and Security and Defence. In addition, she was the Spokesperson on Security and Defence for the Green Party in the EP, as well as a substitute member of the EP delegation to Russia as well as the NATO delegation.

Dr. Cronberg received her Doctorate of Economics in sociology from the Institute for Organization and Industrial Sociology at the Copehagen School of Economics and Business Administration. She also holds a Master’s degree in engineering from the Helsinki University of Technology. She is fluent in Finnish, Danish, Swedish, English, German, French, and Russian.

Read more about Dr. Cronberg’s extensive career in defence policies, civil/military relations, border policies, labor and employment, and more on her website, www.tarjacronberg.fi.

John Burroughs

Executive Director, LCNP
Director, UN Office of IALANA

John Burroughs represents LCNP and IALANA in Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty review proceedings, the United Nations, and other international forums. Dr. Burroughs is contributor, Unspeakable suffering – the humanitarian impact of nuclear weapons (2013) (available here); contributor, Assuring Destruction Forever: Nuclear Weapon Modernization Around the World (2012) (available here); co-editor and contributor, Nuclear Disorder or Cooperative Security? U.S. Weapons of Terror, the Global Proliferation Crisis, and Paths to Peace (2007) (available here); co-editor and contributor, Rule of Power or Rule of Law? An Assessment of U.S. Policies and Actions Regarding Security-Related Treaties (2003); and author of The Legality of Threat or Use of Nuclear Weapons: A Guide to the Historic Opinion of the International Court of Justice (1998). He has additionally published articles and op-eds in journals and newspapers including the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, the World Policy Journal, and Newsday. Dr. Burroughs has taught international law as an adjunct professor at Rutgers Law School, Newark. He has a J.D. and Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley and a B.A. from Harvard University.

Jonathan Granoff

President, Global Security Institute

Jonathan Granoff, President of the Global Security Institute, is also Co-Chair of the Blue Ribbon Task Force on Nuclear Nonproliferation and Senior Advisor to National Security Committee of the International Law Section of the American Bar Association. He serves on numerous governing and advisory boards including the Global Dialogue Institute, Middle Powers Initiative, Jane Goodall Institute, and the Bipartisan Security Group. Mr. Granoff is both a Member of the World Wisdom Council and a Fellow of the World Academy of Arts and Sciences, and has represented the International Peace Bureau at the Nobel Peace Laureate Summits in Rome every year since 2002. He received his Baccalaureate degree, Cum Laude, from Vassar College and Juris Doctorate from Rutgers University School of Law.

Dr. David Krieger

Nuclear Age Peace Foundation

Dr. David Krieger is founder and president of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation. NAPF is a non-profit, non-partisan international educational organization. He holds a PhD in political science and is a graduate (cum laude) of the Santa Barbara College of Law. NAPF has initiated several important peace projects such as a World Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons and a Magna Carta for the Nuclear Age calling for individual accountability for crimes under international law. Krieger who has made the abolition of nuclear weapons a life-time commitment, is the author and editor of numerous books on global issues: disarmament, technology, earth citizenship, and editor of the Waging Peace Series. He also serves as adviser to a number of foundations including the Foundation for the Establishment of an International Criminal Court and the Committee of 100 for Tibet.

Alyn Ware

Global Coordinator, PNND

Alyn Ware is the Global Coordinator of the Parliamentarians for Nuclear Non-proliferation and Disarmament (PNND) and co-founder of UNFOLD ZERO. Previously, he served as Executive Director of the Lawyers’ Committee on Nuclear Policy and the UN Coordinator for the World Court Project, which led the effort to achieve a ruling from the International Court of Justice on the legality of the threat or use of nuclear weapons. In addition to his numerous leadership positions within the peace and security field, he is co-author with Merav Datan of “Security and Survival: The Case for a Nuclear Weapons Convention”, and with Annie Doherty of “Our Planet in Every Classroom”, and has written numerous articles.

Country Representatives

IRELAND:
Tony D’Costa

General Secretary, Pax Christi (Irish Section)

JAPAN:
Dr. Hiromichi Umebayashi

Special Advisor, Former President & Founder of Peace Depot Inc.

Dr. Umebayashi is a PhD holder in the field of Applied Solid State Physics from Tokyo University. After resigning from teaching in a university in 1980, he became a fulltime campaigner and researcher for peace, disarmament and human rights issues. He is the Editor in Chief of bi-weekly periodical “Nuclear Weapon & Test Monitor” (in Japanese) and the Supervising Editor of the Year Book “Nuclear Disarmament & Peace — for Citizens and Local Authorities” (in Japanese). He won the Peace Prize of Peace Studies Association of Japan in 2008.

Expert Consultants

Douglas Roche, O.C.

Chairman Emeritus
Senior Adviser

The Hon. Douglas Roche, O.C., Chairman Emeritus of the Middle Powers Initiative, is an author, parliamentarian and diplomat, who has specialized throughout his 40-year public career in peace and human security issues. He lectures widely on peace and nuclear disarmament themes. As Canadian Ambassador for Disarmament, he was elected Chairman of the United Nations Disarmament Committee at the 43rd General Assembly in 1988. His forthcoming book, How We Stopped Loving the Bomb, will be published early in 2011.

The Middle Powers Initiative, an international network of eight non-governmental organizations specializing in nuclear disarmament issues, works primarily with middle power governments to encourage and educate the nuclear weapons states to take immediate practical steps that reduce nuclear dangers and commence negotiations to eliminate nuclear weapons.

Peter Weiss

President, LCNP
Vice President, IALANA

Peter Weiss is the president of the International Association of Lawyers Against Nuclear Arms and its US affiliate, the Lawyers’ Committee on Nuclear Policy. Mr. Weiss is a graduate of Yale Law School and has lectured and written widely on the international law of war and peace, nuclear weapons and human rights. He was the principal author of the draft brief on the illegality of threat or use of nuclear weapons used by many countries in making written submissions to the International Court of Justice in the 1996 nuclear weapons advisory opinion, and served as counsel to Malaysia at the hearings. He has published several articles on the ICJ opinion, including in the fall 1997 issue of Transnational Law and Contemporary Problems. Mr. Weiss is also a leading human rights lawyer with the Center for Constitutional Rights, and litigated the seminal case establishing the right of victims of torture to sue their torturers in US courts (Filartiga v. Pena-Irala). Since his retirement in 1996 from Weiss Dawid Fross Zelnick & Lehrman, a leading trademark firm, he has been Senior Intellectual Property Counsel to The Chanel Company Limited. He is also a founder and former President of the American Committee on Africa and former Chairman of the Board of the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington. He has also long been an activist for peace in the Middle East and is currently a member of the Arab-Jewish Peace Group in New York and of the Executive Committee of Americans for Peace Now, which supports the Peace Now movement in Israel.